The Band: Pioneers of American Music
By Craig Harris
(Rowman & Littlefield)

If you want to know all there is about The Band, read The Band: Pioneers of American Music by Craig Harris. From the beginning of this infamous Americana group to its sometimes fractured history to its end when it was hardly recognizable as the outfit who released such seminal albums as Music from Big Pink and The Band, Harris gets it all in through interviews, reviews and a pretty much no nonsense approach to this rock and roots group’s take on their music.

The band’s biography is one of the late 50’s early 60’s legendary American rock (via Canada where lots of the members of the group were from originally) stories touching on Dylan’s infamous stab at ‘going electric’, the hard world of the road and the Woodstock generation. All the way through there was the band, either backing somebody or making music that flew in the face of psychedelia during the late 60’s early 70’s but was so influential, so many modern-era musicians sight The Band as an influence and there would arguably be no Americana/roots music now without them.

I love simple hard won stories like this, histories of groups that reveal as much about the musicians featured as it does the times they worked in. There’s not many stones left un-turned here-there’s particular good stuff on Dylan “going electric”-and lots about the individual members of this five piece as well as Harris really looking deeply into the individual songs.

Craig Harris tells their story brilliantly in just about 200 pages of his book The Band: Pioneers of American Music.